“Conservative activists don’t want to have a conversation,” said Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “They want to disrupt.”
OK, so I really like the new iPhone. However, its Voice Control feature is really not up to snuff.
Firstly, if I want to dial the phone by voice, I have to take the phone out of my pocket and speak into it—even if I've got a Bluetooth headset connected. My old RAZR let me voice dial into the headset by pressing the button; why won't the iPhone? The headset button just makes the iPhone redial your last outgoing number, and only if you hold it down for a couple of seconds.
Secondly, if I have a playlist containing only podcast episodes, Voice Control won't play it. Apparently Voice Control will only play songs for some reason. I've got multiple podcast playlists (one for the short daily ones that I want to listen to first, and another for the other longer ones that come out less frequently), so when I want to switch between them I have to glance down at the screen.
Thirdly, and probably most important to me, there's no way to use Voice Control to start a playlist in shuffle mode—which, once my podcasts are finished, is exactly what I want to do. I have to start a playlist, then separately issue a "shuffle" voice command or shake the phone (if 'shake to shuffle' is enabled). While this could a serviceable enough option, it adds one to the Skip Count of the first item in the playlist! I haven't skipped the song; I just wanted to start the playlist in shuffle mode. This throws off my smart playlists, some of which use Skip Count and Last Skipped Time to determine which songs should be included.
The worst part of this two-steps-to-shuffle bit, however, is how long it takes—especially while I'm driving the car. I should be able to issue a single voice command, not go through the whole rigmarole twice just to end up how I want it. Not to mention that it takes nearly 3 seconds of holding the button down just to start Voice Control each time, and then it may or may not understand my command properly the first time anyway.
Actually, in the process of writing this post, I discovered way to get a playlist going in shuffle mode without incrementing any songs' Skip Counts, but it takes three steps! First, issue the Voice command "shuffle", then it says "no music is playing; do you want to play music now?" So then you have to wait for the beep and say "yes," which starts playing your whole library in shuffle mode. Then you can start Voice Control again and tell it to play a particular playlist, which will then start in shuffle mode.
Apple, please think of the people who are using your products in the car! Make it simple to place calls and initiate shuffled playlists without looking at the device! There's a "shuffle" button at the top of every playlist in the visual interface; shouldn't that be an option in the spoken interface as well?
I realize that, at iPhone OS 3.0's introduction, they said that Voice Control wasn't totally complete. However, its inclusion at all was one of the big things that convinced me to finally get one, so I'm a bit disappointed that it was added on without the usual polish of most Apple products.
As is often the case, Dave Barry's humor column makes an important point.
You know what I miss? I miss 1960. Not the part about my face turning overnight into the world's most productive zit farm. What I miss is the way the grown-ups acted about the Kennedy-Nixon race. Like the McCain-Obama race, that was a big historic deal that aroused strong feelings in the voters. This included my parents and their friends, who were fairly evenly divided, and very passionate. They'd have these major honking arguments at their cocktail parties. But unlike today, when people wear out their upper lips sneering at those who disagree with them, the 1960s grown-ups of my memory, whoever they voted for, continued to respect each other and remain good friends.
What was their secret? Gin. On any given Saturday night they consumed enough martinis to fuel an assault helicopter. But also they were capable of understanding a concept that we seem to have lost, which is that people who disagree with you politically are not necessarily evil or stupid. My parents and their friends took it for granted that most people were fundamentally decent and wanted the best for the country. So they argued by sincerely (if loudly) trying to persuade each other. They did not argue by calling each other names, which is pointless and childish, and which constitutes I would estimate 97 percent of what passes for political debate today.
First of all, I realize that this will be the third time I’ve had a blog post with this title, which might make this one a bit more ironic.
In any case, last night I was thinking about the American tendency to end sentences by trailing off into the conversational ether. For example, when people start a story or thought and then finish with “so…” without really coming to a full stop. I know I'm guilty of this myself at times, and I can’t really point fingers, so…
I’ve decided that the reason for this is mostly laziness. It’s basically saying, “I’ll lay down the tracks for this train of thought, but hopefully you can see where it leads and I won't actually have to articulate the whole thing.” Of course this is mostly done between people who know each other well enough to finish each others’ sentences anyway, but that still doesn’t excuse the ennui that leads to deliberately unfinished thoughts.
After all, when I used to be an editor (the links at the beginning of this post are quite old; that’s no longer my job) I would never let an author end a phrase with an ellipsis. Granted, I mostly dealt with sheet music, but I also edited the accompanying text and I'm passionate about the written word as well.
The “…” punctuation literally stands for an undefined, and possibly unuttered, group of words. For instance, if you wish to quote someone and leave out a portion, you'd use it in the place of what you blanked out: “Mary had a […] lamb.” When it's used deliberately (by that, I mean “not editorially”) at the end of a phrase or sentence, it leaves the intention of the writer completely up to the interpretation of the reader. And since my number-one priority as an editor and a writer is clarity, using an ellipsis in such a way is completely anathema to my preferred style.
That’s not to say that it doesn’t have its uses. In casual conversation (i.e. the spoken word, personal email), I suppose it can be tolerated quite a bit. And, in the hands of a skilled writer, it can be an interesting rhetorical device. However, when the intent is to convey information clearly, three dots in succession just don't belong anywhere.
My thoughts on this matter were perfectly punctuated this morning by the new Wondermark (link below). I don’t know whether to laugh at the absurdity or cry over the reference to modern lack of expression. I’ll probably do both.
Wondermark by David Malki ! - 420: In which One Thing sparks Another, and So On
It's obvious that Microsoft won't be a big technology market force forever, and here's a great piece from the New York Times detailing their inevitable (and, in some senses, current) state of decline.
The Computer Industry Comes With Built-In Term Limits - New York Times
Nonetheless, I have found joy in much of his writing. In large part, it has been due to the obviously-invented intricacies in the plot lines: the mysterious informant in The Pelican Brief, the terror-stricken life of The Broker, and (of course) the web of lies exposed by the naïve law-school graduate who finds himself hired by The Firm. Many of his books have also made excellent movies, though of course Hollywood’s abbreviated version never truly does justice to the 300-plus-page written story.
I’ve actually read almost all of his books. I never got around to Skipping Christmas, and I just saw on his Web site that last year he published a new football story called Playing for Pizza, but I’ve managed to find and devour every “legal thriller” he’s concocted. Lately, though, I’ve been less than thrilled. A couple of years ago he wrote a non-fiction account of a baseball player’s legal troubles in The Innocent Man. Don’t ask me how that one turns out; I quit reading after just a few chapters due to his obvious and blatant bias toward one perspective of the story.
And today I finished reading his most recent work of fiction, The Appeal. Suffice it to say that I’m no longer a fan. My interest in his writing has dramatically waned, mainly stemming from the fact that I now find him bludgeoning me over the head with his personal point of view. When I read fiction, it’s for fun; I don’t want my entertainment to be wrapped around a heavy dose of someone else’s ideology. Whether I agree with his moral stance is immaterial: I’d rather be entertained by suspense, drama, and intrigue than be immersed in the intricate details of litigating and political campaigning from either side of the fence.
In short, I don’t think I’ll be anxiously awaiting Grisham’s next novel. Whether he goes the fiction or non-fiction route, I’m not enjoying the road he’s taking. And since I had been turning to his writing explicitly for the enjoyment of it, all reason for partaking in this “guilty pleasure” is now gone.
I have to get a copy of this book (unfortunately it's not in the local library, at least not yet):
“What you may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune,” Mr. Keen writes. “The new winners — Google, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie — are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred. By stealing away our eyeballs, the blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music and news-gathering industries that created the original content those Web sites ‘aggregate.’ Our culture is essentially cannibalizing its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave.”
I've never read The Da Vinci Code, and the following post at Language Log makes me very glad I skipped Dan Brown's "thriller" altogether. As an editor and something of a language purist, I'm shocked beyond belief at even the minor snippets shared by blogger Geoffrey K. Pullum.
(By the way, the analysis Pullum provides is almost perfect... only once did I have to re-read a sentence, which is my standard measure of unclear phraseology.)
Language Log: The Dan Brown code
Very good...
(And, oddly, the only WonderMark comic so far in which I haven't seen any 'tooltip'-style text come up when I hold my mouse over the comic image.)
Wondermark by David Malki ! - 289: In which a Visitor is shunned
Howard Nemerov: "Absolute power corrupts absolutely; and if you surrender your personal responsibility to a government which promises to take care of you, they will only take care of themselves."
"Many [scientists] appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots."
That's exactly how I feel (and, probably more importantly, that's also the opinion of my environmental-scientist wife). Global warming is certainly an issue, and it's likely that human activity has some sort of an impact on its intensity, but both alarmists like Al Gore and skeptics like S. Fred Singer are off the mark.
As Aristotle said in Ethics, true virtue is found at "the mean between extremes." That statement fits this particular debate probably more aptly than any other issue of our time.
From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype - New York Times
So everybody has been speculating about Apple producing a cellular phone, a widescreen iPod, and various other bits of technology. But, as Valleywag has stated, there's probably something even bigger coming up.
I bet it has something to do with the 32GB NAND Flash chip that SanDisk announced a few days ago...
Geekzone: SanDisk Launches 32 Gigabyte Solid State Drive
Today's classic Calvin and Hobbes (originally published November 29, 1995) is disturbingly prophetic. If Watterson thought things were going down the tubes eleven years ago, I imagine he's positively appalled by now. If so, I'm in complete agreement.
goComics.com featuring Calvin and Hobbes
